


Fix You

by iRockYourSocks



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 17:47:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iRockYourSocks/pseuds/iRockYourSocks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katara ran away from home and finds herself broken, a drifter, and views her relationships as her path to understanding who she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fix You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SongofHopeandHonor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SongofHopeandHonor/gifts).



> For Shannon, who has run out of things to read.

She sits on the bed, _their_ bed, spreads her fingers across the threadbare sheets, clenches the edges. Her brother told her that this was a bad idea, _he_ was a bad idea, but of course, Katara ignored him, because since when did Sokka’s _instincts_ ever prove right? 

Now, she muses, a lone tear trailing down her face, her idiot brother may have been right.

She doesn’t have anything, him taking the money before he went out on the last walk of his life.

She holds his pack of cigarettes, the one thing he actually left in their apartment when he ran off to the store, and places a stick in the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t smoke, thinks it a nasty habit, but Jet always had one of them hanging off his lip, lit or not. 

Sokka said that Jet did it to look cool.

Maybe, maybe not.

Either way, Jet is real cool now, his body losing the familiar warmth that was a common presence at her side. 

When Jet offered her an escape, a way to leave the responsibility that had plagued her young life for something new, she barely hesitated in gripping his hand and following him to the bus station. Of course Sokka had come looking for her, but that was over a year ago and he still hadn’t found her.

Katara is fifteen and a runaway with nowhere else to go, and she finally understands that even though Jet offered her freedom, she’s still bound by the chains of her old life.

* * *

Katara is seventeen and she thinks she’s in love.

He’s only a couple years younger than her but wise beyond his years. His grey eyes see more than most, and Katara isn’t sure if Aang is looking at her or her troubled past.

She likes it when he kisses her, light and delicate as if she would break if he applied more pressure. It’s a far cry from the heated lip locks she had with _him_ (it still pained her to say his name out loud, much less think it), because _he_ was her first everything, first boyfriend, first kiss, first lover.

Aang is different though, looking for companionship rather than someone to share a bed and a bleeding heart with.

She likes running her fingers through his short, messy hair, thankful that he _finally_ removed the blue strip from the middle. She wouldn’t tell him, but the low, cerulean mohawk wasn’t the best decision that he made.

She’s happy, an unfamiliar feeling, but this happiness set about a pit in her stomach. It’s not in her cards to be this happy, this carefree. It’s not in her genetic make up, and she’s sad that she feels like this.

Still, when he holds her hand, tells her that she’s beautiful, that he’d want her forever, she flushes hot, but the pit in her stomach burrows deeper.

Katara doesn’t deserve to be his forever girl, doesn’t deserve this boy of sunshine and smiles. She’s too broken, too far in the land of disrepair, and she doesn’t want to ruin him, corrupt his sunny ideals.

Katara is seventeen and thinks she is in love, and she knows the right thing to do.

* * *

She leaves on the next bus out of town.

* * *

Katara is eighteen and she doesn’t know the difference between hatred and lust.

When this incredibly broken boy, man rather, since he is twenty, presses her into the door to his apartment, fingers chilled from the winter winds biting into her ribs and the wire of her bra, lips on hers, she decides that maybe hatred was too strong a word.

She doubts that she’d let a man she hated tear her clothes off, leaving her as naked as she were the day she was born.

She wouldn’t let a man she hated slide his naked body between her hips, let him slide his fingers between hers over her head.

Katara shouldn’t enjoy this, enjoy _him_ , because he’s been the biggest pain in the ass since she was hired at his uncle’s teashop.

She thinks they have a connection, the two of them, no matter how grudgingly she came to that conclusion.

When her breath hitches, her leg resting in the crook of his elbow, and looks into his harsh but slowly softening golden eyes, she sees a man that has been to hell and back, who may just be more broken than she is.

Katara likes mending broken things, some things about _that_ life never go away.

She isn’t surprised when he jumps when she curls around his warm body and presses her lips to his chest. She _is_ surprised, though, when one of his arms wrap around her.

Zuko doesn’t say anything, but he hardly has to; she might not like the scarred man, and she hasn’t felt love since she left her sunshine, but she thinks that they can grow to understand one another.

She muses that the saying is right, that even though tragedy breaks hearts, hardens them, something can always trickle in through the cracks.


End file.
